Billions of dollars of coastal real estate will be under the sea. Crop yields will plummet. Electricity demand will soar as life becomes increasingly unbearable without air conditioning.

The polar ice caps will become polar slush caps. Many people will continue to insist that global warming is a hoax. And no matter what anybody actually believes, or thinks they can prove, about what's causing the obvious degradation of the biosphere, humanity will continue spewing carbon into the air.

Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that the Obama administration has opened the spigot, allowing two U.S. companies to export unrefined oil for the first time since the Arab oil embargo of the early 1970s.

America is now awash in natural-gas condensate thanks to this improved, yet environmentally controversial, drilling technology.

This condensate oil is sometimes called "drip gas" or even "natural gasoline." When I covered the energy beat in the Texas Panhandle in the 1980s, locals called it "white oil." I watched an oil man funnel it into the gas tank of an old truck, right from a drip tank near a wellhead.

The companies producing this ultralight hydrocarbon liquid want to get a higher price for it overseas. Send it somewhere where other people can burn it even faster.

The last thing domestic energy producers need to produce is lower energy prices for Americans. It's now more profitable to plunder America's nonrenewable energy resources and ship them abroad.

On the same week that this plan came to light, a report that was sponsored by some uber-wealthy investors enumerated a litany of economic risks posed by climate change.

Behind the report, titled "Risky Business: The Economic Risks of Climate Change In The United States," was New York's billionaire former mayor, Michael Bloomberg, hedge-fund manager Tom Steyer, and Hank Paulson, the former Goldman-Sachs head and Treasury secretary.

It seems at least some Republicans are willing to consider climate-change scenarios, especially when they're in the investment business and they get a look at the mounting bills.

Among the economic risks the report cited:

As much as $23 billion of Florida real estate will likely be under water by 2050.

The annual cost of coastal storms along the Eastern Seaboard and the Gulf of Mexico will reach as much as $35 billion.

Midwestern and Southern states could see a 10% to 20% decrease in crop yields over the next 15 years.

The Southwest will be even more consumed with wildfires than it is now.

Electricity rate payers will be shelling out an additional $12 billion a year for air conditioning.

Construction activity will slow and more people will die every year from the intensifying heat.

"The U.S. climate is paying the price today for business decisions made many years ago," the report said. "Every year that goes by without a comprehensive public- and private-sector response to climate change is a year that locks in future climate events that will have a far more devastating effect."

Well, here's the "comprehensive public and private sector response" so far: "Frack it!"

What an incredibly ignorant series of comments. Have any of you "skeptics" and name callers even bothered to read the report Al Lewis writes about? It starts, "Our research combines peer-reviewed climate science projections through the year 2100 with empirically-derived estimates of the impact of projected changes in temperature, precipitation, sea levels, and storm activity on the U.S. economy."

There is a large and growing body of work supporting Lewis' (and the report's) conclusions. Maybe you all should read some of those studies. Here's a few that are quite accessible:

Well, the last sentence of this article was certainly an enjoyable "read", but everything that preceded it was less so, in my view. I'm trying to spend the rest of my life with a smile on my face, but I keep running into guys like Mr. Lewis, who prefer, and are determined, it seems, to destroy the smiles on the faces of as many (otherwise) happy readers as he can. Al, I do not need your carbon anxiety!

Mr Lewis makes a nonsequiter argument (stringing together two or more unrelated observations/facts). Fracking's environmental costs and storm frequency/severity are unrelated. Even the latest IPCC's latest AR5 says the increased use of natural gas has dramactically reduced CO2 release. Separately the IPCC says there is no evidence CO2 increases have led to more intense storms. The opposite is true, storm severities of all categories have fallen over the last 25 years, while CO2 levels continued to rise. Fracking's biggest threat is to the renewable solar and wind power believers, as it drives those sources even more economically untenable, and that is the real source of demonization of fracking from the ilks of Tom Steyer (who has bet billions$$ on continued heavily tax-subsidized renewable energy growth).

The other giveaway of Mr Lewis's ideology laced lies are his statement, "It's now more profitable to plunder America's nonrenewable energy resources and ship them abroad."

I agree with Al Lewis that " And no matter what anybody actually believes, or thinks they can prove, about what's causing the obvious degradation of the biosphere, humanity will continue spewing carbon into the air."

So, let's go from there. We can't stop it. We can slow it down a little, but so what.

First, I would not give the Democrats credit for fracking. They are allowing it now because the economy is in the dumpster and they are in charge. The instant the GOP takes control, they will turn on a dime and shut fracking down completely.

Second, there is a simple way to solve all of the problems you itemize, Al. It's called nuclear power.

Hey Al, as usual the folks on your side of the argument use fear and intimidation NOT science to promote your agenda of what a better world we'd have without Oil and gas. For the most part the theories that excess carbon is heating the planet to unsustainable temperatures is just not accurate. Everytime others catch your side in a lie you come up with a new spin, albeit you started with the term Global Warming and when that didn't work Al Gore and his ilk switched to Climate Change. Bahahahaha . . . your side just cant get its story straight. Well here is some FACTS for your readers. This video by one of the most respected Meteorologist (John Coleman)

who provides a rebuttal to the Wack job environmentalist who would attempt to ban Oil and Gas from our lives in a zealot attempt to worship Mother Earth. No one is stopping anyone from using Solar, wind or water. Just stop trying to stop the rest of us from using Gas and Oil.

"The companies producing this ultralight hydrocarbon liquid want to get a higher price for it overseas. Send it somewhere where other people can burn it even faster.

The last thing domestic energy producers need to produce is lower energy prices for Americans. It's now more profitable to plunder America's nonrenewable energy resources and ship them abroad."

Here we see an example of basic economic ignorance. Mr. Lewis seems unaware that if companies are choosing to ship their product abroad, it is because they can get a higher price over there. Which means the price here must ... be ... lower...

Article is inherently flawed... it fails to grasp the progress of technology impacting consumption rates and protecting environments worth saving. He's right about drilling oil until it's gone but there are sources author hasn't considered. Innovative humans will move elsewhere, like Antarctica, well, basically the polar caps, where air-conditioning isn't needed (yet). I see this article as fear-mongering... a waste of time with no real solution presented nor an argument worth reading. Where's the editor?

Total complete hogwash. Why the WSJ let some blogger mouth off is beyond me. This sort of manure has no place in the journal. If you wish to play the escathological cargo cult religion of the AGW, please cite models that have predictive skill.

No spices in animal kingdom history has survived the explosion of it's population. Human race went from 1B in beginning of 20th century to over 7B and counting by recent numbers. To accommodate the population explosion the industry hand agriculture has exploded. Trying to decrease the industrial carbon production is just acting like an ostrich. The true problem is the population explosion. This country is being over run by the illegals flooding the Southern border and eventually be ruined because of it. And the politicians are only busy trying to protect their power not to protect this nation. Globally, we see wars and conflicts and famine,starvation,disease,etcs. These are signs of unrest and there is no one way to solve this problem. The human population has gone beyond the control to survive on earth. It is not the weather change that is so important but the explosion of population that brings every thing with it is the problem. We are watching the slow death of human civilization.

what a foolish article. fracked natural gas is a far better alternative to strip mined coal for generating electricity, and coal is the leading fuel source for electricity, both here and abroad. lets not make the perfect the enemy of the good, but rather use fracking to help push coal out of the energy mix. exporting liquid promotes fracking by making the plays that yield natural gas more profitable. this ruling is thus a huge win for the environment. the WSJ should be ashamed of itself for printing such drivel.

Global warming is spoken of as if the planet were the size of a goldfish bowl. The goldfish bowl can simply warm or cool but the planet does not: every year some of it cools and some of it warms -- so how do you take the temperature of something so complex? In order to measure net warming or cooling you are therefore obliged to calculate the net heat gain or loss of those areas of different temperature change and then net it out; but is this possible? Without nice, clear, unchanging boundaries between the warming and cooling areas of the land and particularly the oceans, [since the oceans wield far more thermal mass which also moves around], isn't thermal mass measurement impossible?

The oceans also have entirely unpredictable vertical currents so the boundaries there are three dimensional, plus, how many boundaries are there: millions? billions? So I call bull to even measuring global temperature meaningfully -- I'd say that's a problem for the climate change folks.

He may be right. But for two hundred years we have had doomsday people claiming that they could prove scientifically that disaster was coming.

From Malthus in 1810 or so who predicted that we would run out of food before 1900 (improved agricultural methods proved him wrong), whales were harder to find and we were running out of whale blubber a crucial source of oil, half a century later we were running out of wood for railroad ties before a preservative was invented, we have been running out of petroleum so often that it's impossible to list all the scares. In 1970 we were running out of food by 2000 but instead we have an epidemic of obesity. We were running out of precious metals which would have made the electronics industry die. No comment.

What we are running out of is people who read history and learn from it. I hope I prove to be wrong.

Today I read an article that the Antarctica is still growing and even with the Arctic shrinking, it seems that global warming is really being overdone by the Greenies similar to the chickens yelling "The Sky is Falling!" Moreover what can one say about the growing number of coal usage in China and India that will more than offset what the declining carbon dioxide usage in the United States. How in the world can the United States alone offset what going on in all of the world? Carbon dioxide does not stop at the borders.

@Joel O'Bryan The anti-frackers and CAGW escathological cargo cult religion types like to make a big deal about methane being a ghg. It does have spectral absorption bands in the IR. Problem is, those are at the same place that CO2 has them. CO2 has a lot more of them btw. Even with a much lower CO2 fraction in the atmosphere than we now have, CO2 swamps CH4. When something is opaque, you can not make it more opaque.

- too late to save the US from a depression initiated by Obama's economic destruction in the name of changing natural climate variations , aka weather?

- too late to save 100s of millions of Americans from power blackouts as Obama forces the power utilities to stop investing in dispatchable generating capacity? (if you don't understand the terms "dispatchable power" vs "non- dispatchable power", then you have no business arguing for or against fossil fuels or solar/wind power.)

- too late to save millions of American manufacturing jobs dependent on their factories's access to reliable electricity at cost effective rates?

increasing [CO2], if anything, is stabilizing the climate temps to mitigate the coming Little Ice Age and increase plant resilence to shortened growing seasons with more CO2 (as above). A LIA event would be far away more destructive than moving the global temps up a degree C or 2.

@tom harrington Actually that is not true. Every year more people consume oil and gas, yet every year the size of proven reserves increases. One school of geological thought says that petroleum is produced as part of normal geological activity and we shall never run out.

But rest assured, every year the amount on hand increases, and the amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth by those who are perpetually wrong gets louder.

@YAAKOV WATKINS John D Rockefeller was the greatest environmentalist of them all. He saved the whales by building up Standard Oil and using new technology to provide heating and lighting oil that did not require whales to be slaughtered. Think he got any recognition for his benevolence?

@Joel O'Bryan It's hard to continue reading after your first point. Please be specific on which Obama economic policies are responsible here and some evidence of their impact on the economy. The economy was already wrecked as he came into office.

@James Heath@YAAKOV WATKINS Most people aren't aware of it, but the switch from coal to oil in home heating and for rail transport was an environmental move. In the 1940s people who wore white shirts in New York had to change them at noon because of the soot in the air. Petroleum is certainly better than that.

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